413: No Such Thing As Squid Playing Games

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from York.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Huntson-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that actually squids don't play games.

It's not so much a fact as like a passive-aggressive message to Netflix.

Oh, yeah, got their IMDb ratings when James Harkin gets on Senate.

I think you will find.

Is that show anything to do with squid playing games?

No.

Have you rumbled them?

No, I haven't.

No.

Okay.

It's just a silly thing.

Basically, I was reading about play and about games and the evolution of playing.

And I wanted to see what animals do play and what animals don't play.

And for obvious reasons, I thought I'd see if squid play games.

And I found an article in the Journal of Current Biology called Fun and Play in Invertebrates by Sarah Zielinski.

And she says there is no evidence in play for cuttlefish or squids as defined by Burkhart's five criteria.

So there's like these criteria you use in biology to find out if someone's playing or if something is playing, I should say.

So it's they do something that's not functional, they do it voluntarily, they do it different to the way they normally do it, so it's slightly changed.

They repeat it and they do it when they're not under stress.

And if they do all those things, then that counts as play.

It's interesting that not under stress is a criteria for play because I think I was pretty stressed throughout the playground years.

Yeah, you weren't playing when people were holding you down on the floor and I was working avoiding being it and it was hard and I lost all the time.

And I suppose one kind of interesting thing about that is most invertebrates don't

so invertebrates things without a backbone, most of them don't play, but octopuses that are very closely related to squid, they do play.

So it's kind of interesting that those two related things do.

And so have we have we you know had them in tanks and sort of like plop chessboards down and sort of like monopoly like have we actively tried to get them to play

No, they don't do that, but they, you know, they've studied them many times over the years.

And with things like octopuses, they've just noticed that they happen to do this.

So octopuses will kind of get like a little crab.

And when they're full, so they don't want to eat the crab, they'll do a bit like a cat does with a mouse.

So they'll catch it and then they'll let it go and go a little bit further and then they'll catch it again and stuff like that.

So that counts as playing because it's just for fun.

It's like not exactly the same as catching a crab, but it's very slightly similar to catching crabs.

Yeah.

I feel like squid have a bit of a reputation as kind of the poor cousin of the octopus, because the octopus is so charismatic, it's so intelligent.

We keep being told they're as intelligent as a you know bright 12-year-old.

They could do GCSEs, all of this, and squid are sort of the...

They could bully Andy in the playground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, and squid are kind of the, you know, the thick cousins, and sort of, you know, they're just good for calamari.

But they're brilliant.

They're really brilliant.

And there are so many varieties of squid as well.

So

one of them, I've found out in the course of this squid game thing, Grimaldituthis bomplandi, okay?

This is a particular kind of squid.

And it is a squid which uses a squid within a squid method of catching prey.

It is so cool.

It has these tentacles, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, nice long tentacles.

And they look in low light, and it swims in an area of the sea with quite low light.

In low light, the ends of these tentacles look like baby squid, okay?

And they leer in predators, and it flaps them around like a baby squid bobbing around helplessly and it leers in predators, the kind of predators which like to eat baby squid and then aha ha,

it eats the predators which turn up expecting a helpless baby.

That's a nice attached to this gigantic.

That'd be quite confusing if like your hand looked like your child.

Would that not be weird?

Yeah.

Like you might accidentally feed it or put a nappy on it or something.

True.

I don't know.

I think it's more like they're just doing finger puppet shows to each other, which is really entertaining.

But lethal finger puppet shows, you know.

Yeah, sure, where you eat the audience at the end.

That's what mine always went as a kid.

Yeah, they are quite.

So there's one squid called,

confusingly called Octopoteuthis deleptron, but it's a squid, not an octopus.

And it's, I think it's the only squid they found so far that intentionally rips off its arms.

And it does it to defend or attack.

And

how?

So to attack, does he rip off an arm and hit someone with it?

I think it's more like distraction.

I would be distracting.

If you're in the middle of a boxing fight with Chris Eubank Jr.

and he pulls his arm off, you'd be like,

and then he can clog you in the head with the other arm still attached.

But it's going to be his last fight.

So, yeah, this woman was studying them, and a quarter of these squid have at least one blunt arm, a lot of, as in an arm which is missing a bit.

And they can ditch them at any kind of joint.

They can ditch them at various bits up the arm.

So you only need to drop the bit that's being threatened.

And it's so cool.

This researcher was called Stephanie Bush, and she collected a bunch of squid to put in tanks in her lab.

And loads of them immediately shed their arms at her trying to get away.

And she said there was one of them which was when in the lab it grasped the bottom of the container with its arm hooks.

They've got little hooks on their arms.

It somersaulted repeatedly and released ink as it detached part of all eight of its arms.

And as they released the arms, they flashed because you know they can emit their own light squids.

So all the arms got released and then flashed lightning bolts through the water.

That is amazing.

This is horrifying.

They're also one of the few squid that has a penis.

Yeah.

The Octopotututhis deletron, was it?

Yes.

So yeah, they have a penis and they have sex by depositing sperm on the body of the females.

The males do.

Although I say females, actually, they're pretty indiscriminate because they live where it's quite dark.

And researchers have looked at all the different squids that have squid semen on them.

And it's pretty much 50-50 male and female.

Right.

They'll just, if they see a squid, they'll go for it.

Oh, cool.

They're desperate.

Yeah,

that's amazing.

A lot of these squid go their whole lives without meeting another squid.

This is why they're so desperate.

Yeah.

So when they see one, you can't blame them.

Right.

Oh, it's kind of sad.

Have you know, have a chat first or you know, some a drink.

Just go straight in for the shag.

Yeah.

I was looking up squid games and I actually found something the opposite to what we're talking about, which is humans trying to get squids in competition.

So there is an all-England squid championship that takes place.

So

it's an annual championship.

So what this is, is there's 74 competitors that go out and they spend five hours hoping to catch over 100 squids during the course of the day.

Five hours.

And then, yeah, they find the longest one.

In 2012, it was won by a guy called David, who was a reigning champion.

He'd won the previous year.

But in 2012, there was terrible weather conditions and it was really, really rainy and no one was catching any squids and he happened to notice just before he was sending his reel back out that right on the tip of his little hook was a tiny squid a third of an inch long and it was the only squid caught that year

So the 2012 winner of the All-England Squid Championship was a third of an inch.

I want to watch that documentary and put it on Netflix called Squid Game 2 or something like that.

No one must have believed that squid when it got back to its friends and said, guys, I just won squid of the year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He would have got semen all over him from every witch way, wouldn't he?

Well, while we're on that.

Good.

And we were obviously going to be at some point.

At some point, at some point.

Let's get there now.

The northern pygmy squid.

Did you hear about this?

Oh, yeah.

So this is a squid where the female fertilizes her own eggs.

Okay, it's bizarre.

So

as James said, the male kind of attaches the sperm to the body of the female.

So it's not a kind of mating as we would understand it, but the sper the sperm.

You know, as you would understand it, maybe.

I like my sperm to spot as it on my shoulder.

And you know, I can dip in whenever I like.

Well,

you know,

female choice.

I'm just going to cut that out, by the way.

And when Dan goes, fact number two, Anna Toshinski, it'll just be like, my fact is, I like to see the one back back of my shoulder

it's just less effort sorry Andy you were saying

well you would fit in like a charm into the northern pygmy squid society Anna because the male attaches the sperm to the female and then it goes through it sort of get gets into her body somehow I'm not exactly clear on the mechanism but it gets into the female's mouth when she's ready to inseminate and then she bites a hole in each of her eggs and just you know deposits a bit squirts a bit of sperm into each of the eggs to fertilize the eggs wow so she is doing the fertilizing at that point bizarre that's very cool that's like in in Vicho or a test it's like a test tube baby kind of yeah yeah

those guys are pretty cool they have like a sticky patch on their back and when they're get when they're kind of swimming around if they get tired they can just stick themselves to a bit of seaweed

and they just watch things go past

and then unstick themselves and then swim around again.

That's so cool.

And we say they don't play.

Come on.

Did you guys ever do a flywall when you were kids where you would do a somersault against a velcro wall?

That's just like that.

I don't.

Well, we didn't have a Velcro wall in our house, sadly.

What room?

Where did you keep your Velcro wall in?

It was next to the Bouncy Castle drawing room.

So on actually how they reproduce, there's this really interesting thing that they've recently discovered, which is it's about the egg mops.

So I quite like this, that when the female deposits all her fertilized eggs, they're called mops and they're in these big piles and she sticks them to the ground and then male squid are attracted to these and that doesn't really make any sense because they've already been fertilized so they're no use to the males but what it means is there are fertile females in the vicinity because they tend to kind of hang out together and not only this the male squid are attracted to the egg mops and then they come up to the egg mops and they kind of hug them very weird and sort of stroke the eggs and we didn't really know why they were doing this but it turns out that there's a chemical on the eggs and as soon as the male squid sort stroke and hug the eggs, they get this chemical on their arms and it turns them into like raging maniacs.

So they go from being really chilled to being super aggro, and this means that they fight other males in the vicinity.

And the woman's just back there, the female's just back a little way, going, Okay, yeah, all right, he's got some good biceps, I'll take him.

And yet, yet, when I go and hug the children at the local playground and then get into a fight with another bloke just outside it, I'm asked to leave the park

now.

It's a good trick.

it's amazing that's amazing that's so cool do you know a squid have won two nobel prizes have they yep no they haven't yet someone's won a nobel prize and it's been about them

they don't play they don't play because they are all work and they fuck

into the nobel prizes they did all the work really the humans got the you know the humans andrew huxley and a few others and bernard katz got the got the awards but basically it was from cutting up squids so i think the squids deserve a bit of credit okay and the reason is they have massive nerve fibers in their body, right?

Our nerves are really, really thin, really tiny, you can hardly see them.

But in a squid, they're massive and you can see them.

And originally they thought they were blood vessels.

They're so big.

But that means that you can do loads of stuff to these

nerve fibers and you can learn about how they move electricity from one place to another.

You know, you can see what's inside them and stuff like that.

And so people studied them and they won Nobel Prizes for it.

That's very cool.

Yeah, cool.

That is cool.

I'm still giving the humans some credit for that.

Yeah, fair enough.

50-50.

We need to move on to our next fact in a second.

I read an article on something called Mel Magazine online.

I think they were a bit short on ideas and they wanted to piggyback on squid games.

So they asked a group of squid fishermen who are in the squid game if their job is anything like the TV show.

One of them said that in the show, most people are looking out for themselves, and that's very similar to squid fishermen because they have secrets about how to attract squid, and many of them will not share the knowledge with other people.

Well, that does happen a bit in squid games.

Exactly.

Does it?

Okay.

And another person is still a bottom-of-the-barrel commission for this magazine.

Another person said,

squid fishing is actually really fun and is a family-oriented sport, so it's nothing like squid game.

The only asshole thing I do in squidding is when I'm pulling up a squid, they tend to squirt out the ink as come out of the water.

So, if you aim that at the person next to you, they tend to get covered in ink.

Wow.

That's really fun.

They're their own little water pistols.

Yeah, yeah.

Cool.

Oh, I so want to know what the techniques are to lure a squid in.

Like, do you put like...

Oh, you get little kind of...

The old Japanese way, what they would do is they'd have lures that look a little like baby squids kind of thing.

But when they squirt the ink, it produces a thing which is roughly the size and shape of a squid.

And it's called a pseudomorph.

So the predator is momentarily confused.

What am I going for?

Which of these two?

So

it's like leaving a hole in the wall that's the shape of you or something.

Yes.

And you run away.

Yeah.

Can I just say one thing about animals playing?

There's a woman called Linda Sharp who studies lots of different types of play in animals and says, basically, we all say we know why animals play, social bonds, preparing for adult life, but actually, we've got no idea.

It's probably just because it's fun.

And case in point, she said she was watching some elephants and there was an elephant at the top of a slope and it saw another elephant it's a muddy slope saw another elephant at the bottom of the slope and it starts walking up towards this elephant at the top of the slope and when it's halfway up the elephant at the top gets on its bum like tucks its legs in and sort of toboggons down the slope

straight into the other elephant so it takes them both out they roll down to the bottom of the hill they tumble around have this big old fight and then eventually she saw they've sort of dusted themselves off and then they were like okay we'll climb up the slope now they climb up the slope They got halfway up.

There's a third elephant at the top.

Have you seen it before?

It's all exactly the same thing.

That's amazing.

That's awesome.

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We need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in 1935, New York issued a total ban on the possession or supply of baby artichokes.

This

was sent to me online, actually, by at Fodsox.

So thank you, Fodsox.

This is a fact about the

30s war against the baby artichoke, or specifically against the mafia through the medium of the baby artichoke.

It was the main war of the 30s, wasn't it?

The artichoke.

Yeah, it was the main war for most of the 30s, and then there was a very strong late entrant, unfortunately.

I think in America, it was the main war for all of the 30s.

That's a very good point.

But are you giving the artichoke credit here in the way that James is giving the squid a Nobel Prize?

No, you're not.

I'm not giving the artichoke any credit.

I'm giving giving the mayor of New York, who was Fiorella LaGuardia.

So La Guardia Airport.

That's New York named after him.

He was a big deal.

And in 1935, he walked into one of the biggest markets in New York City and he announced baby artichokes, they're off the menu.

And it was going to start the day after Christmas.

And he said, I like artichokes, particularly with holiday sauce, but the ban will remain in force until the grip of the racketeers is broken.

And basically, it was because the mafia controlled the baby artichoke supply and and made a load of money supplying New York with baby artichokes.

And it was one of their major, major things.

You know, it was

illegal alcohol, drugs, and then baby artichokes.

And they kind of forced the restaurants to buy them, didn't they?

And made them really, really expensive and cornered the market.

And then it was just like, yeah.

And they bought them at cheap prices, too.

They squeezed the farmers at one end and then they squeezed the restaurants at the other end.

A lot of squeezing, man.

Very clever.

Yeah.

Didn't he lift the ban within a few days?

Oh, yeah.

Because he was like, actually, I really like artichokes.

No, he won't.

Because he likes artichokes.

no he won he beat the mafia in three days yeah because basically there was this one guy with mafia bus called ciro terra nova and he was known as the artichoke king

well the only thing i know about artichokes is they make you fart so i don't know but anyway so he was the one who was in charge of it and when um legardia said you can't sell artichokes then he had no one to sell his artichokes to and all the shops said okay we're not going to do it one or two people did carry on selling them but they all got their licenses taken off them right and then within three or four days it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to ply his wares in new york anymore okay yeah it was really it was a rapid turnaround yeah it was really yeah and it was it was because most of them were coming in from california that's where they were all grown and there were stories that mafia agents would go to california they would intimidate the growers of the farmers into lowering their prices they would even this is reported at the time i don't think it's true threatened aerial gas bombing of the farming fields I saw reports in the newspapers that that happened, but again, it might not have been true.

But the interesting thing was, because that was happening in California, and this guy was working, the Artichoking was in New York, suddenly it was in two states, which meant it was a federal case, which meant that they could get all their federal people involved, which suddenly made it a really big deal.

If it was just in New York, it would have been hard for him to do anything about it.

Do you remember we did a fact a very long time ago about Marilyn Monroe being named Artichoke Queen?

Yeah.

Yeah, there was a theory that the reason she was named that was because they were trying to give a bit of sort of gloss back to an industry completely dominated by the mafia i thought you were going to say it's because she was married to the artichoke king

okay they ruled it rule the artichokes yeah i've just realized artichoke king sounds like something that a mafia boss would do to you doesn't it yes

subject someone to a real artichoking

by stuffing those weird white frond things in the artichoke down your throat that's how you'd do it.

You'd make them eat that middle white bit.

I know you are terrified.

I just, I'm frightened of artichokes.

The sperm shoulder bandits tried again last night.

And it was just baby artichokes then.

It's very specific, isn't it?

Yes, okay.

Because they're quite similar.

The mafia could have branched out into just the slightly bigger ones, but they didn't think of that, I guess.

Not so smart.

Yeah.

Because I think actually the only difference is that baby artichokes don't even have the chokey bit.

They don't have the annoying fuzzy bit that I don't like, right?

And they're not even younger.

It's a real misnomer.

They just grow lower down on the artichoke plant.

So I think they're from the same plant, but they don't get as much sunshine, so they don't grow to be as big.

And yeah, they're just more tender and nice.

Easy.

That's like how baby carrots are not really a different kind of thing.

They're just...

I think they're just chopped up carrots, aren't they?

Yeah, I think they might be, but I've never been confident enough to say...

And I really regret bringing it up now.

Lisa's got a thousand people in York looking at you when you're saying that.

It's like an anxiety dream that's like Jerusalem artichokes as well.

Sorry?

Jerusalem artichokes.

Oh, yeah.

Not from Jerusalem.

Not artichokes.

Not even any kind of artichoke.

What the fuck is going on?

Yeah.

The guy who first found them decided they tasted a bit like artichokes, so they must be artichokes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Don't know where the Jerusalem bit came from.

Well, I love the Jerusalem bit.

This is one of my favorite etymologies.

This is because, so they look like sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, on obviously not the like gross tuber bit, but the bit that grows out of them looked like sunflowers.

And

Europeans discovered them in the 1600s.

There was a French explorer and brought them back, brought them back to Europe, and they got to Italy and they were called girosol, as in sunflower, as turns round with the sun.

So the word for sunflower in Italian.

And giroasol gradually turned into Jerusalem.

Very good.

Like it.

Yeah.

Do you know that the Italian word for mafia or for a mafia clan is

chosca or sosca and that means artichoke heart?

No way.

Interesting.

Is it because they're they're tightly bound together?

He's only gone and got it.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So the artichoke leaves are all really close together and that's what the mafia clan is like.

And they can't be separated.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

That's cool.

Very difficult to eat.

Do you know how...

But it can be done.

It can be done.

Do you know how we got the artichoke in the first place?

No.

We just grew grew it?

Well, it's from...

No, actually we didn't.

No, this.

Waitrose?

No.

It's a couple of thousand years old.

It dates back to ancient Greece, the artichoke.

And it comes from a time when the Greek god, Zeus,

fancied a woman called Kinnara, or Sinara, and he installed her in heaven as his kind of mistress.

But then she kept on sneaking back to the mortal plane to see her family.

And Zeus found out about this, and he got really annoyed and turned her into an artichoke.

And that's how we have artichokes.

And that's how we have them.

them.

Yeah, okay.

Well, I actually believe James's version about us just growing them.

You choose what you want to believe.

Yeah.

Just very quickly back to the mafia.

I was very surprised to discover that they're just involved in so many different rackets, aren't they?

And in 2014-ish, they started getting into wind farms.

So they went green.

Oh, they're very ethical.

Always.

Yeah, so they're known as the Eco Mafia.

And in Sicily, wind farms are a massive deal there now and the money that is being generated from selling all of the power across Europe is such big money that that's their thing.

So yeah, it's just such a bizarre thing.

I suppose those big blades can cut off the horses' heads.

They're also into organic food as well.

The mafia of the mafia.

Yeah, yeah.

They're such hipsters these days.

Well, I say that.

They're into getting cheap food from Eastern Europe and then relabeling it as organic and then selling it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I was shocked.

Shocked.

As someone who lives in East London at the level of contamination of what claims to be organic food by the mafia.

So believe you me, if you think you've got extra virgin olive oil at home, you probably haven't.

This is because they're adulterating all this stuff.

And actually in Italy, the police employ special tasters who are specifically trained to spot fraudulent food, to taste lots of types of olive oil.

Sweet gig for the police to have.

They do things like they whiten mozzarella with detergent, they make bread with asbestos.

Okay, that's a less.

Is it getting less sweet as a gig as you say this?

Yeah.

Wow.

But extra virgin olive oil,

adulteration of that is the biggest source of agricultural fraud in the world.

And 60% of extra virgin olive oil that's sold is not that.

It's not extra virgin.

Wow.

So what is it?

Just straight shit oil.

Oh, right.

It's just adulterated with less good quality oil.

And it's not urine or anything.

You'll be fine.

You won't notice the difference.

But

you're being bamboozled.

Okay.

That sounds fine.

And that's the spirit which wrote the mafia in 1935.

I'm just a bit worried that we're giving the mafia a lot of shit in this podcast, and I kind of want to distance myself a tiny bit.

Oh, wow.

You keep giving me that shit oil.

I'm fine.

My family, Mike Living.

Thank you.

Bring it on, lads.

Come on.

What's behind you?

This is an extra virtue over here that you are not getting early on.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that until recently, in the Chinese city of Chongqing, you could hail down a stick man to carry your bags by by shouting, Bang Bang!

Which is a fun idea and a mysterious fact to say without explaining it.

So I almost want to just leave it at that.

What do you mean by a stick man?

It's that like someone, like one of those people that tells you where the gents' toilets are?

That's not, they don't tell you where the toilets are.

They only indicate where it is.

I think by the time you're seeing the stick man, you've found the toilet gentle.

I'm over here!

Quick!

Free me!

There's a stole free, quick!

I'm not talking in, there's a guy having a massive shit stair.

It's not one of the toilet warning signs.

It's um, so these are men called bang, it's actually bang bang.

Um, but we discussed this and we decided if you shouted bang bang as an ignorant English person, then they'd probably know what you meant.

And it's the name for these stick men, so they're people who carry sticks around, and they were extremely populous in like up until the early 2000s, really, in Chongqing.

And they're porters.

And the reason that they remained in that city is because the terrain is very hilly.

It's lots and lots of winding alleyways and lots of steps connecting one place to the other.

And you can't really get a car or anything around.

It's even hard to get a bike around it.

And so all you can do is you can say, I've got 17 heavy suitcases.

And here's a small guy with a stick.

Can you carry them all, please?

And they do it.

It's unbelievable the loads that they carry.

There's not as many these days as though they're kind of going out.

Yeah, there was a documentary quite recently called The Last Generation of Bang Bang, which was explaining that kind of these people have got other jobs now, like delivery people, like I don't know, Deliveroo or that kind of thing, whatever the Chinese equivalent is.

And so a lot of people do that.

But they were really popular.

There was a soap opera called Mountain City Bang Bang Men, which was all about them.

Oh, wow.

And there's also a drinking game.

If you're a student in Chongqing, then you might play this game.

And the drinking game is basically whenever you see one of these guys, you drink.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Wow, that was a game.

Oh, no, people are so much more sober now.

So, Chongqing has got a huge population.

It's like 32 million.

At the time where they were sort of at the peak before the decline, there's about 30,000 stick men that were in operation.

I was reading Chongqing.

In my head, I was like, I know this place.

How do I know this place?

And it's because it has my favorite rail station in, so a metro station, a train station in Chongqing, which is, they have them very high up, kind of like monorails that go around through the city.

And one particular path that it needed to take was going to be in the exact spot where they were building a residential building, which was 19 floors high.

Yeah, so between floors six, I believe, and floors nine, I think those are the right ones.

There's suddenly in a residential building, a train that just goes through the building.

Stops in the building as well.

And

so it's a stop in the building.

And they had to soundproof all of the apartments to make sure that all the noise wouldn't get to them too much.

Yeah, how cool is that?

That's from Chongqing.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

I'm just sort of carrying extremely heavy weights.

It is kind of unbelievable.

So lots of people, particularly people who are mountain porters, so this is, you know, very high-altitude environments, can carry unbelievably heavy weights.

So

they studied mountain porters in Nepal.

There was a scientist from Belgium called Norman Hegland, and he was a muscle physiologist.

And he thought, I've got to know what is different, different, like what is different physically about Nepalese mountain porters.

Because they, on average, the guys he studied, weighed about 56 kilos, but they can carry 68 kilos.

They can carry more than their own body weight, and they're carrying it uphill, steep uphill.

And he studied them, and he found nothing different physically about them, except that they're just extremely tough.

That's the only thing he found.

On average, they can carry 90% of their body weight.

The heaviest load he found was 175% of the guy's weight that he was carrying.

And by comparison, physically fit Westerners, you know, backpacking or whatever, you can do about 25% of your weight for a couple of days and then it really, really hurts.

And these guys have just done so much of it.

Yeah, but the other thing that he said that he noticed is that they're incredibly slow.

They just keep to a pace.

And so, for example, if they were going to a Saturday market and they were running late, they would get up late before, you know, early in the morning and they would just rather walk there at their super slow pace rather than in any way be fast.

Oh, really?

Like, go through the night.

Yeah, they'll go through the night like fast is just not an option for them.

They'll just pace themselves.

But basically, the lesson seemed to be: we're only pathetic in the West.

I mean, that was his conclusion, wasn't it?

He was like, Well, it turns out there's not a special gate that they have that's really great.

They're not actually using oxygen much more efficiently.

We can just actually carry way more than 25%.

So, next time you offer to help someone with their bags, think twice, okay?

Because

we should be carrying this amount as well.

There are some people in Europe who do this as well.

So, in Slovakia, in the Tatras Mountains, there are a load of hostels that are really high up, but there are no roads that get there.

And so, they have to take everything up there.

So, they'll take, if they need a refrigerator up there, they'll strap it to the back and just walk up.

If there's a microwave, they'll strap it to the back and just walk up.

And the record, the amount that the strongest person that's ever taken up to these hostels in Slovakia was going to the Laco Kalunga Castle Hotel, and this guy carried 207 kilograms on his back

to this place.

And that, if you don't know what that is, that's the equivalent to carrying a red deer, an upright piano, or all of Little Mix.

Wow.

Whoa!

Wow.

That's really put Little Mix into context for me.

We've all learned something from that comparison.

Little Mix weren't the same as one red deer.

I reckon.

Either red deer are a lot bigger than I thought, or little mix were a lot smaller.

Inclusive in the name, the little mix, obviously.

Which little mix, because there were four, but now there's three.

It's the four.

The four, okay.

Which lineup?

Which sugar babes line-up could he possibly have taken?

I was reading about porters generally and just seeing what roles they've played in history, and I found a really fun thing, which is in 1930, a porter carrying some luggage led to the creation of the Association for Mutual Help of the French Nobility.

And this was too.

It's a bit late for them, I think, by then, isn't it?

Because I didn't know that 150 years earlier.

This is the thing, right?

It's basically looking after all the noble people who fell from grace.

So two people were walking along, they were having their luggage carried, and they suddenly noticed the person carrying the luggage was someone of noble stock.

And they thought, hang on a second, what's going on?

Why are you doing this menial job when you should be, you know, glorified in your family's right to be great?

And they said, we need to give you some money.

And they thought, what if this is happening elsewhere in France?

And so they set up this association, and people can still to this day apply for, yeah, for please send my kid to a good school because we don't have enough money, but we're from noble background.

Look at our surname.

And they bust a bunch of others.

If you're going to give some money to charity, perhaps there are a few others other than the

people that are.

I'm changing all my direct credits right now.

This is unbelievable.

They need another revolution.

Did they learn nothing?

I want to know how they noticed that the guy carrying the bags was of noble stock.

That's the big question for me.

Like, did he have a birthmark?

He was bleeding.

His hands were bleeding because of the blisters, and I guess the blue blood, does that give it away, maybe?

But what was, what do we know what it was?

They just recognised maybe it was his manner.

Maybe it could have been an old friend from school.

I don't know.

I met.

He was just like, do you know my great uncle was the Baron of Orlis?

Wow.

This is about carrying heavy weights.

It's not actually about humans carrying heavy weights.

But some dung beetles, which are called Onthophagus torus, they can pull 1,100 times their own weight, which is very impressive.

And it's entirely evolved because of their sex life.

Interesting, because I assume that all they're carrying is dung.

Well, yeah, but I mean, the dung is big relative to the dung.

But in fact, you're right.

Sorry, it's not because of the dung moving.

So the females will dig a tunnel under a cow pat.

That's where they create this kind of tunnel of love where they're getting ready to mate.

It certainly sounds like a sexy tunnel.

For a dung beetle, unbelievably sexy.

And basically, so the female goes into the tunnel of weights, and then a male will go into the tunnel, right, to mate.

But sometimes a male will get into the tunnel and find there's a rival male already there.

And they have evolved this unbelievably strong movement where they fight, they tussle, and they lock horns and they try and try and try to pull each other out or push each other out of the tunnel.

So, as a result, they've evolved the ability to move a thousand times their own weight.

Wow.

However, there are some males which are not like that.

They're sneaky males, they're not strong, but they are fast walkers and they have extremely dense testicles.

And they

fast walkers with extremely dense testicles.

That's a hell of a Tinder profile, is that

because you'd think that'd slow slow you down.

Yeah, but yeah.

Yeah, but it could be the momentum can pull you forward.

You know, like when you walk and you kind of move your arms back and forward, you could swing your testicles as you walk.

Or a standing long jump, you propel yourself forward, yeah.

Anyway, so they even sneak into the tunnels, attempt to shag, attempt to get out quickly.

So that just the woman turns out she prefers the dense testicles to the extremely strong ones.

Is that the idea?

How are they winning?

It's not clear what criteria she's applying.

I think if there's a male there, she'll mate with it.

I've not got my head around the dense testicle thing.

What is that doing?

Like, what is it?

Well, they've just got,

it just means they're producing a lot of sperm and they can quickly get in, mate, and get out.

I guess they've put their resources into sperm quality rather than into physical power.

But how do you tell someone that your sperm quality is great?

I don't think they're communicating on this level that we're

right.

If there's a male there, the female will mate with it, and he turns up.

It gets in there.

There's no flirting, I think.

It's a bit like.

You're in a tunnel under a cow pet.

I think the romance is pretty dead.

Oh, dear.

I was looking at other jobs that you could describe as being like porters, and I was thinking one of my favourite things that I read a while back is that Scottish fishermen's wives were basically porters of their husbands.

So, this is in the 19th century, the herring industry was massive in Scotland.

Everyone was a herring farmer, herring fisherman.

And the fishermen, when they went to get in their boats, they would usually have sea

like would go from a beach.

So they'd have like they'd go off from a beach, get in a boat, and they don't want to get wet because they're going to be out all day, and it's fecking cold in Scotland.

And so the wives would always carry their husbands into the boat.

So you'll see their old photos of these husbands with all their fishing tackle all in their arms, and their wives just carrying them like a baby and plopping them into their little boat, waving them off with a packed lunch.

That's amazing.

That's so great.

The man who has carried the heaviest load for 10 meters in history was a guy called Patrick Bobolian.

And at the end of walking the 10 meters, he shouted out, Vegan power!

Nice.

Yeah.

And he was trying to prove that you can still be strong and have a vegan diet.

They interviewed him afterwards and said it was a bit of a stupid thing to do and it really hurt.

If only I'd had a sausage sandwich before I set off.

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Time for our final fact, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1994, the music group, the KLF, burnt £1 million.

27 years later, they're still not sure why they did it.

and have even toured the UK asking audiences if they have any idea why they did it.

So

this was a very famous moment in 90s music.

KLF were a massive band.

Justified and Ancient was a huge, they were huge.

Their singles were massive selling, but they were very artistic and they were very anti-the industry.

And they decided that they were going to absolutely wipe themselves out in a way that a band has never done before.

They were going to take all their music away from catalogs that were publishing it.

They were going to remove it from all shops.

And they were going to take the last amount of money that they'd made, which was a million pounds take it out of their account and take it to an island uh jura which is in scotland and they went to a boatshed and they set it alight and they and they burnt a million pounds and there's a lot of controversy did they really do it um they claim they absolutely did a lot of people are very skeptical there's been a few investigations into it where the bbc have seen that they've taken the money out from the bank and they've found little bits of burnt embers that matched when little um numbers that would appear on specific bills kind of matched the ones that were taken from the bank.

But did they really do it?

Is a question a lot of people have.

I think they did.

James, I think you're a skeptical about that.

I think they didn't.

Just on balance of you know probability, I think they didn't.

They might have done.

Quite often we have facts on this and I'm like, that's definitely bullshit.

This one, I'm about 60-40 that it's bullshit.

Yeah, right.

But like for instance, the little bits of burnt notes that they found, they were found by a farmer, but it turned out that the farmer's son had gone to school with one of the band.

So it's quite a nice coincidence that they found it.

So I read an interview with the journalist who first wrote it up.

He was called Michael Pilgrim, who's working for the Observer magazine.

And he says that he still doesn't know for sure whether it was true or whether it wasn't true.

I think that was the journalist who received the story, but he wasn't there.

It was Jim Reed who was there.

Sorry.

He wrote the terminal.

He was there.

Yeah, yeah.

So Jim Reed thought they definitely did it, I think.

And this guy reckons that they definitely burnt some money because he has some of the money that was burnt in his house, but he thinks possibly not a million pounds yeah which I think is where I stand on it

in 2017 they were discussing it and that they at this festival that Dan was talking about where they asked audiences why they did it and they got an economist to describe it as quantitative tightening which is a really good phrase and they there are acts who are burning money today so there's there's an organization called burn your money which sends some members in 2017 to the island of Jura to burn some of their own money and they even have their own magazine this organization which is called Burning Issue.

Why are they doing that?

Just to imitate the

initial guys do it?

Yeah, exactly.

So,

initially, after they did it, they did go on.

There was a documentary made about it because they had a friend called Gimpo who was with them who filmed it.

So, we do have footage of it.

That wasn't his real name, was it?

I can't even remember.

He was called Alan Goodrick.

Right, Alan Goodrich.

And so, you can be sure if he's called Gimpo, it's probably not his real name.

It could be Mark's Group.

I don't know.

To Mr.

and Mrs.

Goodrick, a son, Gimpo.

But so they took this video around the country and they asked these questions, you know, why do you think we did it?

Because they genuinely couldn't quite work it out, but they are an artistic band.

And there's a so I got this fact from a book that's called the KLF by John Higgs.

It is genuinely, I think, the best non-fiction book I've ever read.

Genuinely, it's my favorite non-fiction book.

It's magical.

And it's not just about this band.

It's about what they encompass, the worlds of the occult, the esoteric, everything that was going on in pop music.

It's just, John Higgs, stunning.

And basically, what they decided was after they went round showing this video and not getting anywhere, but getting a lot of people furious with them, that they would not talk about it for years and years and years.

So they signed a contract on the side of a car, a rented car, pushed it off a cliff as an official contract, and didn't really talk about it for 23 years.

Occasionally came up in conversations.

I bet it came up in conversations with the car rebels.

That film was really interesting because they filmed it and then they

kind of destroyed the camcorder.

But then the person who filmed it, who was Gimpo, said, oh, actually, I'd already made a copy of it, so we can have that instead.

And he turned that into a little film.

And they advertised that they were going to show it in Brick Lane in London and that anyone who turned up could get free lager.

Okay.

Okay.

So lots of people turned up.

But too many people turned up.

So they had to cancel the whole event.

And they were stuck with 6,237 cans of tenant super.

This was on Christmas Eve, and they decided to give it to the homeless

before someone working for the charity Crisis said they were utterly irresponsible.

I mean, it's pretty hard to argue with.

I think they weren't the first people to describe them as that, I suspect.

It sounds like the maddest experience to be on this money-burning expedition.

I wish I'd been that one one journalist.

And they were so random in what they did.

They just picked this guy, Jim Reed, and call him up.

He doesn't know what he's getting into.

He's told to get in the car with these two guys and Gimpo in the back.

They go to a security firm.

Oh, they buy suitcases in London, two massive suitcases.

Go to a security firm and extract all of this cash and then disappear to Jura.

And it sounds so annoying as well because you'd be so knackered after that long, confusing day.

And they said, okay, we're going to burn all the money tomorrow.

And then Jim goes to bed, writes up his notes for the day, puts his head on the pillow, and immediately they bang on his hotel door at like midnight, go, actually, we're gonna do it now.

Come on, we can't wait.

They said it was like Christmas.

You know, you're so excited.

You can't wait till the morning.

And yeah, they went and they did it in this little, I think it was like a little stone kind of structure.

But he said, the first thing you feel is incredibly guilty as you're watching this money disappear.

And then for the subsequent two or three hours, because it does take quite a long time to burn a million pounds, you are just really bored for a lot of it.

But yeah, so surreal.

Well, the line that someone said about it was, it's one thing to start burning a million pounds.

It's another thing to finish burning a million pounds.

And that is something that has really made them, really

question everything, the fact that they went for the whole thing.

It made people so angry because obviously they could have given that money to charity.

They could have given it to, you know, members of the French aristocracy who were down all their life.

They could have just kept it and pretended that they burnt it.

Yeah, you know.

But

lots of people said that if you burn money by spending it on cocaine or whatever, then you're forgiven much more easily than burning physical money.

It feels very, very

sacrilegious.

But they are constantly, they were constantly doing stuff like this.

They tried to spend their money in very, very creative ways.

So after they'd had a really big hit of one or another of their big hits, they tried to spend the money they got from that getting a massive helicopter and fixing Stonehenge

so that they could put it back to work again, basically.

Come on, let's fire up the motors.

I think also a bulldozer, they were going to bulldoze it down.

Oh,

they bought a big bulldozer to do that.

Didn't they?

Yeah, yeah.

And didn't they bury their Briddlewards underneath, supposedly?

Again, it was conveniently found a few weeks later.

Yeah, right.

He was very skeptical about this.

You know, it might be true, but the thing is, they did have form for lots of little tricks and stuff.

So

they made crop circles, for instance.

There was one time where one of the guys drove around with a massive sound equipment in his car, which he claimed was powerful enough to kill livestock.

Right?

He was going to kill a load of cars with his massive wire.

They can kill one red deer with their sound system.

Or all four of them.

You decide.

And so it's two guys, the KLF.

It's Drummond and Courty.

And Bill Drummond,

I love reading about Bill Drummond.

His ideas are just so wonderful.

One thing that he did, and I don't know if this is still going, I hope he still does it, but Bill Drummond created a soup line across the British Isles.

And the idea was if anyone lives on Bill Drummond's soup line, you can look it up.

If you live and your house happens to be on the soup line, you can contact Bill Drummond and he'll come to your house and make you some soup.

That's...

No.

Did anyone, does it work?

Can we do that?

I hope it's still going.

I'm not sure, but the soup line exists.

You'd have to plan it carefully so it didn't go through a major place like Belfast.

But it's incredible.

Yeah.

The seapline.

Wow.

He sounds wonderful.

The Guardian interviewed him in 2000 which was years and years after they burned the money and they asked him have you regretted it since?

He said no.

Are you financially stable now?

No, I'm not.

No.

And then in 2004 he said, of course I regretted it.

And so it's you can't you can't work out the truth about them.

It's really in they're really, really, really interesting people.

One thing about Drummond is he does like his lines and he believes that there's a ley line that goes from Iceland to Papua New Guinea and it goes through Liverpool and the energy of the Earth comes down from space into Reykjavik, goes all the way under the Earth, and then comes out at Papua New Guinea, and also comes out of a manhole cover in Liverpool.

And this manhole cover is just outside the cavern club, and that's what he kind of thinks.

It's the British Street, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And one time he was the manager of Echo and the Buddy Man, who a lot of you will know a band.

And he get them a gig and Reykjavik, got them to play, and then stood over this manhole cover to listen to see if the music came out.

It did not come out.

But part of his evidence is, you know, Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so Carl Jung, apparently, wrote once that he'd never been to Liverpool, but he had a dream about Liverpool.

And he thought, Carl Jung said, Liverpool is the pool of life it makes to live.

And there's a statue of Carl Jung on Matthew Street.

Yeah, it's a bust that sits up in a building because it was a guy called Peter O'Halligan who'd heard.

So this was a game-changing dream of Carl Jung's life.

He was like the pool of life, and then he said it's in Liverpool.

And Peter O'Halligan went around and he looked for descriptions that would match where Jung might have dreamed in his head.

And he discovered that there was this manhole sitting at the end of literally 30 seconds walk from the cavern, which is why maybe the Beatles had such mystic powers and so on.

Presumably Drummond.

I lost everyone.

Presumably Drummond didn't believe any of this but thought it was a chaotic entertaining thing or really believes it.

I think he might believe some of it, although we'd have to get him here.

We're just so...

I wish we could get him here.

On his 60th birthday, he stood for 17 hours on that manhole.

He didn't believe it, yeah.

17 hours.

Thinking about life, thinking about what he was doing.

Yeah, it's an important manhole.

I think we've mentioned before that Jeremy Corbyn also collects manhole covers.

He does.

Well, he doesn't collect them.

Sorry, that makes him sound incredibly irresponsible, but he is an expert on them.

He knows about them.

John and Together from out from under drummers.

You're not cutting this one.

Like, just to draw us back towards the realms of the possible for a bit, that music is really interesting because they were hugely influential in starting sampling other tracks.

Yes.

And they were one of the, you know, some of the first people to do that.

So in 1987, they sampled a passage from Dancing Queen by Abba, and Abba were not happy about it.

And ABBA sued them and said you've got to destroy all the unsold copies of this record that you've produced, all the unsold vinyl records.

So then the KLF, the two of them, they traveled to Stockholm to give Agnita from ABBA a commemorative gold disc.

They couldn't find her because they were just walking around in Stockholm.

So

they gave the gold disc to a random prostitute they met in the street.

and came home, pausing only to throw the LPs off the ferry as they went.

And then they burned the rest in a field.

They love burning things in fields, the KL.

They love burning stuff and they love throwing stuff into the sea.

Don't they?

It's true.

It's their gem.

And I dig it.

That trip to Sweden sounds very entertaining.

They did sit outside ABBA's record label in a police car that they've managed to get hold of, and they blasted the record that they made from which they'd stolen ABBA's music out at ABBA's record label.

And then they.

Thank you for being inside the office for that.

That's thrilling.

You know, the police are here.

What do they want?

It's hard to tell.

Is this a new siren?

Very confusing.

Um, they killed a moose accidentally, they hit and killed a moose on that trip.

Um, and also they were shot at by a farmer who didn't understandably didn't like them burning shit in his field, but they're never getting permission for anything.

So, the farmer's just looking out of his window and he's like, Oh my god, two musicians are burning huge piles of music in my crop field.

Um, and so they shot their car and they claim they had to be towed back to England by the AA, which I didn't know the AA did call out to Gothenburg, but but.

They're very good.

But so Andy mentioned 2017, they had a panel to talk about why they did it.

So there was this thing when they pushed the car off the edge of the cliff.

23 years, they said, we're not going to talk about it.

And we will, in 23 years' time, have the answer.

Why did we burn this money?

So they set up this big festival.

where they were going to answer the question in 2017.

And there's an amazing hour of footage you can watch on YouTube just from one person filming the whole thing where the KLF return and they've got a big announcement and they arrive in a ice cream van and they've written a new book and their big announcement outside of trying to answer why they did the money burning is that they're now no longer just musicians but they're in the funeral business as well and what they've done is in toxteth in uh liverpool they'll burn you in a field they'll throw you into the ocean

they've set up this idea that you can buy and you can and i've i've seen it online and i almost bought a brick the other day you can buy a brick where you put in, if someone's passed away, a milligram, I think it is, or a few milligrams of the ashes of that person, and it gets baked into the brick, and they're building a ginormous pyramid in Toxteth, where every year they add new bricks to it, and it's going to be something 30-something thousand bricks.

I think.

Like, they haven't started yet, have they?

I think.

Have they got planning permission from the people of Toxteth?

Because I imagine there'll be questions about it.

Yeah, Toxteth Day of the Dead.

It happens on November 23rd.

It's going to happen this year.

I'm going to it.

Toxtiff Day of the Dead?

Yeah, it's a big festival.

They walk through the streets.

It's not a big festival.

It's got Glastonbury.

It's a covered old rockers.

I've never heard of it.

Yeah.

No, it's new.

Yeah, 2017 was the first one.

Yeah, it was.

400 people and they would walk through the cities of Toxteth wearing like this classic Day of the Dead sort of stuff.

You would buy a ticket and you didn't know what to expect.

You didn't know what you would do.

And they would take the numbers and if you were like number one to 20 or something, you would have to form a band, and then the next people would have to get a tattoo done.

It was like Taskmaster, really.

It's pretty much like that.

And another group had to commandeer as many supermarket trolleys as they could and stuff like that.

But before they did this, before they started doing this pyramid, which they will probably do, and they had another idea where they wanted to build a pyramid containing the same amount of bricks as there were people born in the 20th century.

It's quite a nice idea, isn't it?

Who is that?

Well, unfortunately, it's 10 billion.

The Great Pyramid in Giza has 2.3 million.

Right.

So it would have been a hell of a pyramid.

That's for unless you had tiny bricks.

And then

Lego bricks.

Are they selling those bricks?

Do you think?

Are they selling those bricks in it?

Is it basically a pyramid scheme?

Is what I'm trying to say.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very nice.

Hey, we've got to wrap up.

We can't end on.

I'm afraid I'm ending it on that.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like, I'm sorry.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

So I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

It's Andrew Hunter and please don't write about the pyramid scheme thing.

I'm sorry.

James?

At James Harken.

And Anna?

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

There's also links to all the upcoming tour dates of our nerd immunity tour.

Do come and see us.

But I just want to say thank you so much, York.

That was so much fun.

We had an awesome time, and we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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